Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Among the commitments and self-appointed tasks that have kept me away from the blog over the last few weeks has been making some changes to the Dunhill home. While I’ve undertaken a variety of green upgrades and renovations since Mrs. and I moved-in back in the fall of 2006, wildlife issues have been especially on my mind this spring.The ways people have built and developed cities, suburbs, agricultural lands, and mine lands, particularly over the last century or so, can be very disruptive to plant and animal life. Even if we ignore any possible responsibility to care for nonhuman species for their own sake, these species provide important benefits to people. Native birds, for instance, are important for replanting native trees, which support communities of other plants and animals, which collectively contribute to clean water that people depend on. For a simpler example, houses with mature trees and flowers around them have higher average sale prices and spend fewer days on the market.The National Wildlife Federation has a great program to encourage people to make their homes more wildlife-friendly. The Certified Wildlife Habitats program provides guidance on how to reduce negative impacts and realize positive impacts on wildlife. To become certified, participants need points in five areas: Food sources, water sources, places for cover, places to raise young, and sustainable gardening. Most of my solutions are driven at least in part by the amount of time I have to devote to this project. Between family, work, school, and community commitments, I generally have to sacrifice on cost in order to actually get these things done. However, many of these solutions can be accomplished at little or no cost if you have the time and the inclination. I’ll let you know how I’m faring and how I’m solving each of the issues outlined in the certification program.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Here it is April, Earth Month, and this blogger has been silent for weeks. What gives? No, E.R. Dunhill has not been afflicted by white-nose syndrome as a result of installing a bat-box (just so there’s no confusion, that’s a joke, not an actual risk to people), nor have I fallen into my new composter.Like a lot of committed environmentalists, I’ve just been über busy. I’ve been up to my beard in getting ready for an Earth Day event, developing and delivering a Sunday school class on green ministry, writing a term paper (on oxidative enhancement of bioremediation, using Oxygen Release Compound, since you asked), and taking some steps toward getting my yard set-up as a wildlife habitat. Now that the light at the end of the tunnel is coming into view, I’ll have an opportunity to take a breather and blog a little about some these activities. (And yes, Honey, I'll plant the herbs and vegetables.)For the moment, I’d like to wish everyone a happy and productive Earth Month. Keep at it- we’re in this together.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I was given extensive schooling on the issues related to nuclear power back in the 1970s. I was delivering an educational program about energy for the University of California. It was funded by the local utility, but they knew that they needed the credibility of the University for it to have any value, so they took a hands-off approach. The training program itself was organized by a strongly pro-nuclear group, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of major nuclear facilities. Fortunately, the University of California knows how to handle such situations, and I was protected from pressure from ORAU. There was only one confrontation: a speaker from the utility that suffered the Brown's Ferry cable tray fire refused to answer my questions about the peak core temperature, and I pressed him hard to produce the number. Afterwards, my ORAU hosts sat me down for a little "attitude adjustment" session. It was ended by a call to my boss, who hearing both sides and figuring out what was happening, instructed me over the phone to look abashed and embarrassed and say "Yessir" many times. He then told my tormentors that he had set me straight and that they should allow me to contemplate the seriousness of his instructions. When I returned to Davis, he congratulated me for standing up to them.

Anyway, all of this serves to justify my claim of being objective AND knowledgeable about the nuclear power issue. I got the opportunity to talk to some of the top people in government and industry, to visit a number of power plants of every type (I'm one of the small number of people who've actually been inside the containment structure at Diablo Canyon, as well as going inside oil burners, the geothermal facility at The Geysers, two coal burners, and several coal mines). I also benefited from the fact that the Davis campus of the University of California, where I worked, was designated one of the technical repositories of all the energy-related technical materials produced by the Federal government, so I had direct access to every technical report on everything.

So when I claim that anti-nuclear fears are baseless, I know what I'm talking about. The arguments against nuclear power are bullshit. For example, the canard about waste disposal -- that issue was settled thirty years ago with the release of the API report on radioactive waste disposal. Since then we have gathered mountains of data on actual performance of the test sites, and the data has supported all the conclusions drawn thirty years ago. There have been no surprises, no disappointments. If you read the anti-nuclear propaganda closely, you'll discover that they don't claim that rad waste disposal is technically impossible; they claim only that there is no operational rad waste disposal site in the country. And why isn't there a site? Because they've whipped up the fears of citizens so that NIMBY factors, not rational decision-making, control the policy. Basically, their argument boils down to the statement that people are too irrationally frightened by rad waste disposal to permit it.

Safety factors are an even more egregious canard. People point to the Chernobyl accident as an example of how dangerous nuclear plants are. What they don't point out is that the graphite reactors at Chernobyl were never seriously considered in any of the Western nations because they bristle with safety problems. Worse, Chernobyl had no containment structure. Western reactors are kept inside huge concrete and steel domes with walls ten feet thick. The Chernobyl reactors were inside a flimsy building that offered no resistance to the release of radiation.

What about the Three Mile Island accident of 1979? That was, if anything, a demonstration of the effectiveness of the overall safety designs. There were multiple failures in that accident: maintenance failures, equipment failures, and operator mistakes. The reactor itself was reduced to intensely radioactive slag. Even so, the containment structure held. There were several releases of radioactive gases, but intense monitoring of the air and the soil in the immediate aftermath of the accident, as well as the health of the nearby population, has demonstrated that there were no statistically significant effects. Indeed, one calculation showed that the greatest threat to public health was the flight of people away from the accident; there were some automobile accidents attributable to the heavy traffic, and a few deaths.

Compare all this with the lengthy track record of nuclear power over the last 30 years. The French get 80% of their electricity from nuclear, and they have never had a single significant accident. The Japanese get a smaller share, and they've had a few minor coolant spills, but nothing serious. And in this country, in the thirty years since Three Mile Island, we've had enormous amounts of electricity generation and no serious problems. The anti-nuclear doomsayers have been proven wrong. The technology works safely.

By the way, there were two substantial arguments against nuclear power in the 1970s: capital intensity and proliferation. The capital intensity argument observed that a big nuclear program would sponge up lots of capital, driving up interest rates for the entire economy. This argument is no longer significant; although at this grim time for the economy, there's no free capital, in general the economy now is large enough to capitalize lots of reactor construction.

The proliferation argument was the most serious, but nowadays the cat is out of the bag. Short-term geopolitical advantage has at every point trumped long-term anti-proliferation discipline, and time and again the anti-proliferation rules have been bent to keep friendly nations on our side. When even a podunk nation like North Korea can build nukes, we have to admit that our anti-proliferation efforts have failed.

Countering all this is the increasingly desperate situation arising from global warming. It is no longer a mere desideratum that we limit carbon releases; it is now an imperative. And we continue to build new coal plants in this country. Every nuclear plant that we build saves us from building a coal plant. The choice is not between nuclear and solar or between nuclear and wind; it's between nuclear and coal. Yes, we want to build as much wind and solar power as we can; but we're still going to be building coal plants and anything we can do to reduce that building program is to our benefit.

Lastly, we must not forget that the supply of fuel for nuclear power is nearly infinite. All the studies show that even one-pass fuel cycle has plenty of fuel to work with, and if we employ some fuel-reprocessing technologies, we can increase the effective supply of fuel by an order of magnitude. Beyond this beckons the seductive possibility of breeding fuel. A peculiarity of nuclear technology is that it is possible to breed more fuel than you burn while operating a power reactor. In other words, a nuclear power plant can be designed to create more fuel than it consumes -- LOTS more fuel. This is the technology that opens of up the possibility of near-infinite supplies of nuclear power.

There is a catch, of course: the technology originally conceived for doing this -- the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor, or LMFBR -- is completely unacceptable in terms of safety. The first big prototype, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project, was killed by the Carter Administration, and everybody now agrees that it was the right decision. Using liquid sodium a as coolant is not a good idea, because sodium bursts into flame in the presence of oxygen. Imagine what would happen if the coolant in your car engine would burn if there were a leak. Not a happy thought, that.

Fortunately, there are some new reactor designs that, while not as efficient as an LMFBR, are still capable of breeding fuel, and can do so safely. We'll need to put them through lots of testing before building a bunch of them, but they could extend the life of nuclear power -- and completely eliminate the need for fossil fuels -- by mid-century. Don't you think that eliminating our dependence upon fossil fuels would be an excellent goal to reach?

So let's put aside the irrational fears and consider nuclear power as an alternative to coal.

Blue Island Almanack

Humans share a great and contentious resource in our collective home, this blue island in space. This collaborative blog is a place for authors and readers to explore the collective connection of economy, education, environment, and ethics through articles, essays, and debates.